The Complexity of the Future

I have started a new practice – ahead of New Year’s Resolutions – of reading a book for a short time in the morning and again in the evening. The morning practice started as a way of calming myself after doing my morning exercises before I check my blood pressure, but it is growing into something more, a way of setting up my day.

The evening practice is intended to give my mind something to chew on while falling asleep so that it’s engaged with something besides worry. (Worry is not helpful for falling asleep.)

At the moment I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in the morning and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty at night. This was partly chance – Rovelli’s work is in short chapters, perfect for ten minutes of reading at a time and the Prigogine book is from the library and will have to be returned and is also a book that is best read slowly, in short periods.

Both of them are about time and physics – Prigogine won the Nobel for chemistry, but his work was in thermodynamics – and they do fit together well.

I should point out that I am not a physicist nor have I ever wanted to be that or a scientist of any kind. What interests me about both these books is not the science, but the way the science underlies philosophy and the way our world actually works.

Essentially, I am searching – I am always searching – for different ways to get at deep truth.

One of the things I learned in my many years in Aikido is that it is good to take classes from different people because then you get a glimpse of truth from more than one point of view. That is likewise true of reading a variety of people on a variety of subjects.

Part of what I’m looking for these days is how to deal with the polycrisis – or maybe polycrises – we face these days with the right wing extremists getting in the way of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, misogyny, racism, and other deep problems as well as creating new problems by their very existence.

I no longer think ordinary politics is a useful path. I will leave that to the people who still believe that it might work. I will vote and such, but I will not count on anything done through the U.S. political system to solve any of the real problems or to even get the extremists out of our lives.

So then the question becomes, what can we do?

Obviously one answer is to work in community. But work doing what?

My partner and I are involved in housing work – not just affordable housing but changing the way housing is done. My partner is also doing work on clean energy and energy efficiency, especially in relation to hot water. Our friend Debbie has done a lot with getting a public bank established.

There are many other people doing such things and I suspect that a lot of projects like that will bear fruit. I’d like to have a clearer idea of what might work, but I suspect it has more to do with creating new things than with lobbying politicians.

Obviously I also try to write about all of this, in an effort to both understand it and share what I understand. I’ll keep doing that.

At the moment, I am drawn due to my reading to an understanding that everything is rooted in change, something that comes from the study of time in physics. I’m just starting down this path, but I have the feeling that if constant change – really, nothing is stable – and chaos theory underlie all, we can get substantial change in short order if some useful things happen.

I have no idea what those useful things are. Prigogine talks about how “islands of coherence” can shift things very quickly, but I suspect that figuring out how to create such islands is not a simple prospect for the same reasons that give us chaos theory. It’s complex. It’s complicated. It’s not linear.

The only thing I’m sure of is that the old paths are not the most useful ones. History matters as part of the overall understanding, but just because something worked well once doesn’t make it the best choice now.

And yes, I’m aware that Octavia Butler used ideas of change in the Parable books. That’s part of what I’m drawing on as well. I wrote a senryu the other day that included a few words from Butler and a few from Rovelli:

“Vast, ongoing change.”
“The world is nothing but change.”
“No how permanent.”

The first is from Butler, the second Rovelli. That last line is a quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Nothing’s permanent. And that goes for grifters and broligarchs and religious extremists as well. Their reality will not hold.

The sooner we make that true the better.